Efforts to get more women onto BBC comedy panel shows - or other TV programmes
- shouldn’t be dismissed as pure tokenism, says Dina Rickman.
Men who suggest otherwise just end up sounding threatened

Dara Ó Briain has some thoughts on women. That’s not unexpected. From comedy to politics - think Ed Miliband hectoring David Cameron over his all-male frontbench at PMQs three weeks ago - you can barely open a newspaper at the moment for someone (usually a man) discussing female representation.

Ó Briain has a maths background, so let me lay out the numbers. Women got the vote nearly a century ago. Mock the Week has been running for nine years. Women make up half of the population but only 11 per cent of the show’s guests are female panelists. Sometimes just letting things evolve naturally doesn’t work.

In his interview, Ó Briain also mentions that, in the round, far more men want to go into comedy than women, hence why fewer females end up on panel shows. Women involved in comedy should be “cherished and nurtured," he says. “But you’re not going to shift the fact that loads more men want to do it.”

No, this is apparently just one of those strange things that no one can explain, like who built the pyramids, what makes us respond to the placebo effect or why it always rains just as you’re leaving the hairdresser.

I sometimes find it distasteful when people count the number of women in public life to make political points (I’m mostly thinking of Ed Miliband again, but even Ó Briain said the BBC announcing its women target "means Katherine Ryan or Holly Walsh, who’ve been on millions of times, will suddenly look like the token woman".) But I find it offensive when men in male-dominated industries claim women simply don't want to work in them without appearing to take any responsibility for thinking about why this might be.

Ó Briain suggested to the Radio Times that, instead of comedy, the forces of gender equality should concentrate their energies on getting women to try their hand at proper industry like computing, or examining the gender make-up of Question Time panels. But we don’t need to choose between advocating women in computing or comedy.

And pointing to other shows is the rhetorical equivalent of a toddler shouting ‘look over there’ when caught doing something naughty. Even David Dimbleby’s annoyed about Ó Briain bringing Question Time into it, releasing a statement last week stating that he had picked the “wrong target”, pointing out that 44 per cent of their panellists in the present run of the series were female.

The dearth of women in British comedy, or on Question Time or in computing are related - there's a lack of women in pretty much all areas of public life, from the boardroom to the House of Commons, and that needs to be fixed.

Efforts to get more female talent in those areas shouldn’t be labelled tokenism - and men who suggest otherwise just end up sounding a little bit silly and a little bit threatened.

Dina Rickman is a freelance journalist and can be found tweeting @dinarickman